Walter Gilmour was shaken by this murder more than any other he’d experienced. Beth’s disappearance and death were beyond mysterious. Investigators still desperately needed insights into her behavior and actions the night she went missing. Something. Anything. Troopers scoured the greater Anchorage area, interviewing anyone and everyone who knew Beth or claimed they’d been friends.
More Insights
Diane Carlow: I have known Beth van Zanten for years. She was boy crazy, I suppose more than normal. I knew her boyfriend Ed… She also ran with a few of the Brothers motorcycle gang… She liked to walk. She walked everywhere. I don’t think she would accept rides from strangers. I don’t think she would scare easy, since she walked a lot by herself at night. I would classify her as an extrovert.”
Betty Haycox: “I would say Beth was quite shy, reserved.”
Mary McKinney: When Greg Nicholas asked Mary for a date, she asked Beth what she thought of him. “Don’t go out with him,” Beth told her. “I don’t trust him.” Asked her own opinion of Beth, Mary said, “I believe she was quite free with her body.”
Robert Michael Morgan (Friend of Greg Nicholas): “I went over to where Greg lived and met the girl who was killed. She was kind of fat.”
Bob Rettmar (ex-boyfriend): “She I guess was okay. Sort of quiet at times. Intelligent. Immature.”
McHugh Creek Falls, showing the upper parking area and the slope that Beth van Zanten descended as she tried to escape her captor. (photo: Jay Singer)
My own insights? I suppose some people are fully-formed at age 18; I know people for whom high school was, and will doubtless always be, the pinnacle. But jobs, travel, education, marriages and children are all sure-fire change agents. To say that Beth hardly knew herself at that age is an understatement.
There is a greater insight here, one that borders on cliche: as a species we hardly know anybody in a manner that approaches a true depth of understanding (though we keep trying). We are all pupae awaiting our next stage, be it butterfly, moth or mosquito. Or to blatantly mix metaphors, we are all blind men describing an elephant.
Not that any of this ever stopped someone like Walt Gilmour. The job of investigators is to sift through the rot and find the truth, no matter its name. At this point, they still had miles to go. And Gilmour would not sleep.
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